


Beyond Sorrow and Grief

by lit103



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: :(, M/M, but also :)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-17 21:49:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3544997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lit103/pseuds/lit103
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe, just maybe, Thorin didn’t have to come to the Shire, because maybe a hobbit—he didn’t mean <i>himself</i>, mind, but a hobbit—could live down here, so long as they got the hot water pipes under the floors working, made sure the fire in Thorin’s chambers never went out, and found a patch of dirt on the mountainside where pipeweed might grow...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“So I, um, had an idea,” Bilbo says, stopping a few feet away from the throne. Thorin, slumped in it, flips a heavy gold coin into the air with his thumb and catches it with a meaty _smack_ in the palm of his hand. He gives no sign of hearing what Bilbo said.

“Hobbits aren’t very good at smithing,” Bilbo goes on. “I mean, we have smiths, but metalwork’s never been one of our strong points. Dwarves would come through the Shire sometimes and set up shop for a day or two. One of them made my fireplace poker, at Bag End—the one in my bedroom, that is. It’s a very nice poker. Very, um, straight.”

“The dwarf who made it was far from home,” Thorin says, flipping the coin into the air again. _Smack._ “He must have truly lost his way, to find himself in the Shire.”

“ _You_ weren’t going to be lost,” Bilbo says, stung. His voice, higher pitched than he would have liked, echoes strangely in the room—or rather doesn’t, as if the piles of gold all around them are muffling it somehow. “That’s my whole point. There are things you could _do_ in the Shire. You’d be _needed_. Bag End is my home, and I know it’s kind of a weird-sized home and my parents always said it was too big for one person and too small for two but all the same I was hoping—we were hoping—it could be—”

“It was a dream, Master Baggins, nothing more. I am King Under this Mountain,” Thorin says, flipping the coin into the air again. _Smack._ “Bag End is your home, and Erebor is mine. I could no more leave it than—”

“Than I could leave mine?”

“You and I both know, Master Baggins, that you were always going to go back. In fact, I’m not sure why you haven’t already. Why don’t you leave? Leave tomorrow. Leave today! Leave now! I don’t have much use for a burglar who can’t even steal me back my own property.”

Silence, broken only by the smack of the coin into Thorin’s palm. Bilbo pictures himself leaving that night with the Arkenstone stuffed into the bottom of his pack. He wouldn’t even have to use the Ring; Thorin is so gold-blind, so dragon-sick, that it would be days before he even noticed Bilbo was gone. Bilbo will mount the Arkenstone on his wall like he’s heard the orcs do the heads of their enemies, fuck the brains out of the next dwarvish smith to set foot in the Shire—be he as old as Balin or no—and throw Thorin’s stupid mithril shirt in the Brandywine River.

Thorin flips the coin into the air again, but this time it slips through his fingers, clangs to the floor, and rolls across the throne room floor to fall on its side at Bilbo’s feet. Bilbo, without thinking, bends to pick it up, and when he straightens up again, Thorin is beckoning him imperiously forward.

Bilbo wants to disobey, but he honestly isn’t sure what Thorin will do if he does. The King Under the Mountain’s mood swings from magnanimous to petty so often these days that you can never be quite sure where you stand. One moment he’ll be giving away suits of pure gold ceremonial armor to every member of the company; the next he’ll be counting every single coin in the 11th Small Treasury three times in a row and glowering at them all if he comes up short... And the next he’ll be beckoning Bilbo up the three stone steps to his throne. The thing looks designed to be as uncomfortable as possible—all flat surfaces and sharp angles—and Thorin looks uncomfortable in it. It’s tall enough that, with Thorin seated in it, he and Bilbo are of a height. 

Bilbo hasn’t been this close to Thorin since their first night in Erebor, when Thorin forgot all about the Arkenstone and walked the halls with Bilbo, bursting with pride, showing him every cavernous hall, every statue of the kings of old, everything, each glitter in the darkness a vein of ore beckoning them onward and downward til they found themselves climbing up, up, up again to a perilously narrow bridge spanning the deepest abyss in the mountain, and Bilbo wasn’t sure if his head was spinning from the danger of the height or the hardness of Thorin’s mouth on his or the ripe smell of the traveling cloak he hadn’t yet exchanged for kingly robes as he wrapped Bilbo up in it.

Thorin hasn’t been crowned King Under the Mountain yet, but the mountain began to change him the moment he set foot inside it, and the light in his eyes and the laughter in his voice that night had Bilbo thinking maybe, just maybe, Thorin didn’t have to come to the Shire, because maybe a hobbit—he didn’t mean _himself_ , mind, but a hobbit—could live down here, so long as they got the hot water pipes under the floors working, made sure the fire in Thorin’s chambers never went out, and found a patch of dirt on the mountainside where pipeweed might grow... Bilbo even let himself imagine the Feast of the Finding of the Arkenstone, with Thorin maybe—just maybe—standing up and saying shut up everyone Bilbo and I have an announcement to make and Fili yelling yeah, yeah, we know, we’ve known since Rivendell, and Thorin crying wait how could you have known then it hadn’t even _started_ in Rivendell and Kili yelling well you see, just cause you didn’t _know_ it had started doesn’t mean it _hadn’t_ started, now does it, and Thorin shouting shut up, your king commands it, and Bilbo yelling yeah, shut up, your soon-to-be _other_ king commands it and throwing a drumstick at Fili but hitting Kili instead because he’s drunk.

The truth was, though, that as the mountain changed Thorin, so too did the gold—and not for the better. All Bilbo wanted to do was help, and he didn’t know how. Even Balin didn’t know what to do. He spent an entire week doing research, and all he found was a footnote suggesting fresh air might do the gold-sick some temporary good.

Bilbo takes Thorin’s hand, opens his fingers, and presses the coin into his palm.

Thorin closes his other hand over both of Bilbo’s and pulls him close and, in that moment, Bilbo wants more than anything else to toss all the gold in Erebor into the abyss, install Balin as King Regent of the Lonely Mountain, and take Thorin back to Bag End. He’ll give Thorin clothes of the softest cotton, tie his hair back from his face, roll up his sleeves, and put him to work weeding the garden with sun on his face, dirt under his nails, and sweat beading on his upper lip for Bilbo to kiss away...

“Can we get out of here,” Bilbo says. “Just for a little while. Please.”

Out on the mountainside, Thorin seems lighter. He takes a deep breath of icy air, then another and another, turning his face to the sun. Then he sets off walking, beckoning Bilbo to follow.

“Do you know there are dwarf mystics who live entire lifetimes without seeing the sun?” he asks as he strides across the mountainside.

“No,” Bilbo says, scrambling to keep up. “No, I didn’t.”

“One of my ancestors went slightly mad and decided to tunnel all the way to the bottom of Middle Earth. His dwarves toiled day and night for over a year, yet their progress was too slow for him. One day he took up a pickaxe, went down to the tunnel alone, and was never seen again. Dwarf mothers tell their children he’s still down there, chipping away; that he’s bound to reach the center any day now...”

Thorin seems to know exactly where he’s going. Bilbo is lost within minutes. Every inch of the Lonely Mountain looks the same to him—all gray rocks and grayer lichen—but Thorin picks his way around huge boulders and up steep slopes with purposeful ease, Bilbo just barely keeping up. Finally, just as he's starting to think he can go no farther without a rest, they crest one last slope to find themselves at the lip of a grass-covered valley, set like a green jewel in the gray. It’s luminous, somehow, like it’s figured out how to catch and hold the sunlight. At the far end, a spring bubbles up among the rocks.

When he and Thorin reach the valley floor, Bilbo sees they're far from the first to find this place. The crumbling remains of stone walls crisscross the grass; a rusted trowel lies half-buried at his feet. Kneeling to work it free, he finds the soil rich and dark beneath his fingers.

“Dwarves, as you know, are a proud and independent race,” Thorin explains as they makes their way across the valley. “Some—not me, mind, but some—might say to a fault. One of my ancestors—Thror the First, I think it was—decided that dwarves must no longer depend on men for food and had this garden made. Now, dwarves may be the best metalsmiths in Middle Earth, but we are not—I’ll admit it—the best or the most patient gardeners. Thror’s people approached the earth as they might an anvil, but they could not bludgeon it into yielding crops enough to feed them all and eventually they abandoned this, the true jewel of the mountain. Perhaps you should take it as your fourteenth share,” he says as they reach the spring and, before Bilbo can answer, kneels to drink deep from his cupped hands.

The shock of the ice-cold water seems to bring the old Thorin all the way back. As the sun catches the beads of water in his hair and beard and makes them sparkle, kneeling by the spring as if paying his respects to the land he loves, he looks to Bilbo more than a king then than he has at any time under the mountain. He looks, for the first time since that first night, like he might be able to hear Bilbo, really hear him—about the gold, about Bilbo staying in Erebor, about everything—and so, as they cross the valley once more, Bilbo stops and turns and says Thorin, I— and Thorin smiles like the sun rising, takes Bilbo in his arms, and says I know, I know, I know and, just like that, takes Bilbo’s words and replaces them with a future—a future where Bilbo stays under the mountain and tends to the Lonely Garden (as they will come to call it) until in just a few short years the people of Laketown-that-was are clamoring to trade their best fish for Bilbo’s golden summer squash, buttery potatoes, spicy radishes, and crisp snap peas, and Thorin builds a throne for Bilbo that Bilbo never sits in but secretly loves and sometimes sneaks into the throne room at night just to look at for a while, and not only establishes friendly relations with the Laketowners but maybe—just maybe—sends an envoy to Thranduil in Mirkwood someday carrying jewels beyond price and a few of this new kind of Moon-and-Stars pumpkin Bilbo's breeding (deep purplish-blue, with one big yellow splotch like a moon and dozens of tiny yellow splotches like stars all over it), so that there might be peace between elves and dwarves again...

You shouldn’t get your hopes up, Bilbo tells himself. He hasn’t even asked you, and even if he does this will never be as easy as you think. But standing there, shivering in the mountain winds and warmed by Thorin’s arms, all around them the broken, rusting ambitions of an old kingdom and the fertile loam from which the hopes of a new one will grow, he's finding it harder and harder to believe that it won't that easy after all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “There’s something I still don’t understand," Bilbo says. "I keep thinking I’m doing it wrong, this being bereaved thing. It doesn’t feel like he’s _left_ me.”
> 
> “ _Left_ you?” Gandalf asks, sounding greatly surprised. “Oh, no. Thorin didn’t leave you.”
> 
> “Are you going to tell me he’s in _here_ , or something,” Bilbo says, rolling his eyes and pointing to his heart, but Gandalf merely nods and says, “That is precisely what I was going to tell you. The question, Master Baggins, is not whether Thorin has left you, but whether or not you are going to leave him.”

After three days, Bilbo realizes that the grief he expected—the grief he still expects—has not come. He isn’t sure what’s there in its stead, what’s either newly arrived or been there all along. He wanders the halls of Erebor, trying to figure it out.

Gandalf finds him dangling his feet over the edge of the highest bridge in the mountain, leather sack of coins beside him, throwing them one by one into the chasm. He stands over Bilbo for a moment, then makes a “hmm” noise into his beard, gathers up his robes, and sits down beside him.

“May I?” he asks.

Bilbo nods.

Gandalf takes his time selecting a coin from the sack (rejecting a grand total of three), then draws back his arm and throws it with all his might into the chasm. It catches the light from the single window high above them, winks once, then disappears into the blackness below.

“Is it going to happen?” Bilbo asks, when Gandalf, busy selecting another coin, shows no sign of saying a word. “Am I going to . . . I don’t know, throw myself on his tomb and refuse to eat, or something?”

“I could not say,” Gandalf says, throwing his second coin. It, too, winks once before disappearing from view. “Do you think you’re going to throw yourself on Thorin’s tomb and refuse to eat, or something?”

Bilbo snorts. “I’m a hobbit. I wouldn’t last two minutes. Besides, it wouldn’t feel . . . right, somehow. Like I was doing it because I thought I _had_ to, not because I wanted to. If he saw me, he’d probably laugh until he choked, pull me off the tomb, and tell me to go get a meat pie from the storeroom because I looked like I hadn’t eaten in at least an hour.”

“Do you know,” Gandalf says, “I rather think you’re right.”

They sit for a moment in silence, gazing down into the abyss.

“There’s something I still don’t understand," Bilbo says. "I keep thinking I’m doing it wrong, this being bereaved thing. It doesn’t feel like he’s _left_ me.”

“ _Left_ you?” Gandalf asks, sounding greatly surprised. “Oh, no. Thorin didn’t leave you.”

“Are you going to tell me he’s in _here_ , or something,” Bilbo says, rolling his eyes and pointing to his heart, but Gandalf merely nods and says, “That is precisely what I was going to tell you. The question, Master Baggins, is not whether Thorin has left you, but whether or not you are going to leave him.”

*

Thorin has a magnificent tomb, made of stone mined from the very heart of the mountain. Fili and Kili are buried on his left and right hands, and carved into the side of each tomb are the stories of their lives, in pictures instead of runes, so that Bilbo can read them. He can’t get a good look during the funeral itself, and only catches a glimpse of Thorin, wielding the oak branch that gave him his name, looking like something out of a song and not much like himself at all.

Bilbo goes back the night of the funeral and sits cross-legged in front of Thorin’s tomb so he can inspect it for as long as he likes, lifting his hand to run his fingers over the pictures and hoping no one will jump out from behind a pillar and tell him to stop. (No one does.) It turns out he was right. The Thorin depicted here bears little resemblance to the Thorin he knew—to the Thorin he knows—and not only because many of the events took place before Bilbo first met him. Bilbo himself appears but once, and then so tiny he can only tell it’s him because he’s smaller than the rest of the company. The picture is of the fourteen of them setting out on their quest, but the stonesmith had so little space and so much story to tell that they’re only an inch from the mountain, above which Smaug spreads his wings and on the slopes of which Thorin and Azog are locked in combat. At the very end of the tomb is carved a tiny tomb, with tiny carvings on it. Bilbo does not appear in Thorin’s death scene at all.

Well, he decides, if no one else is going to bury him properly, I guess I’ll just have to do it myself.

*

Bilbo can’t quite figure out how to ask Gandalf to come with him, but when he arrives at the small door in the side of the mountain, with Beorn’s acorn in a pouch around his neck, Gandalf is already there, waiting for him. Bilbo buries the acorn in the spot in the middle of the garden—or as near as he can figure—where Thorin took him in his arms that day and said I know, I know, I know, and Bilbo thought, before he stopped being able to think, you don’t, you don’t know what I’m going to say, you don’t know at all, but now, hollowing out the half-frozen earth with his fingers, he thinks maybe, just maybe, Thorin did.

Bilbo lays the acorn in the hollow, covers it with earth, and carries over some spring water in his cupped hands. The earth is so dark that the water doesn’t darken it. Maybe Gandalf expects him to _say_ something about Thorin, he thinks, and looks up with some trepidation to find the wizard some feet away, writing what appear to be runes in the grass with the end of his staff, huge runes that glitter like the first frost of autumn.

“What do they say, Gandalf?” he asks.

“They protect the tree,” Gandalf answers, drawing three dots with energetic jabs of his staff. “Oaks aren’t native to this part of Middle Earth; it will need all the help it can get.”

“Yes,” Bilbo says. “And what else?”

“They tell the story of Thorin Oakenshield," says Gandalf, "to those who have eyes to see it. To those who stand beneath the tree at the very day and hour of his death, or at the very day and hour he arrived at a certain round green door, or the night he showed the place he loved most in the world to the person he loved most in it. I’ve always thought moon runes were an admirable concept, but a tad _limited_ in their execution, haven’t you? So I made a few . . . modifications. These runes will not be visibly only at the time they were created. You can see them at any time of the year Thorin Oakenshield was happy—any time a certain person made him so. A different story than the one on his tomb, no doubt, but no less true for that.”

The wizard turns tactfully away from Bilbo to put the final flourishing touch on his last rune and plants his staff in the earth again with a thud.

“I will not ask if you are all right, Master Baggins,” he says. “I know you are not, and I know that you will be. I will not ask what you will do in a day, or a week, or a year. All I will ask, Mr. Baggins, is what you are going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” Bilbo says, blowing his nose on his sleeve and straightening his back. “Go home, I suppose. But we’ll have to see about getting down this mountain first.”

“Well, I think we should start there then, don’t you?” Gandalf says.

"I'm leaving," Bilbo says, just to make sure Gandalf understands, "but I'm not leaving _him_ ," and Gandalf smiles and says "Indeed you are not."

The wizard’s hand firm on the hobbit’s shoulder, the two make their way out of the Lonely Garden. The evening air is chill; Bilbo wraps his cloak more tightly round his shoulders as they start down the mountain path. The sky all around them is so dizzyingly vast that Bilbo thinks if he looks too long he might fall into it. He concentrates on the path beneath his feet; takes it one step at a time. In the east, the first star is beginning to rise.

Fin.


End file.
